‘All that Music that Rises to the Middle’

The Rink, 3pm. Diploma Work given by Bill Jacklin, R.A., accepted 1995

There is an interesting quote from the Christopher R. Weingarten’s speech:

“Crowd sourcing killed punk rock. Crowd sourcing kills art. Crowd sourcing killed indie rock. Crowds have terrible taste. People have awful taste… All that music that rises to the middle… If you let the people decide, then nothing truly adventurous ever gets out. And that’s a problem.”

The great tension of our times is elitisms versus crowd sourcing. And in many ways this tension is getting worse. I will explain why. Here is the dreadful truth – all systems eventually gravitate towards the middle. An aloof hero ends up craving to be loved, in the process the hero conforms, wanting to be liked by many. A system naturally gravitates toward the most common denominator. The center of gravity is in the middle of a crowd. The change is so drastic that the early adopters must be disposed. The very people who discovered, promoted and even popularized the idea are no longer welcomed. They refuse to accept the dumbed-down version and the system refuses to validate their objections. The early adopters might become such a threat to the stability of the system, due to their status, that they must be eliminated (think Stalin’s purges and slaughter of the thousands of the revolution communists as a drastic example amongst many).

In the early days it took years or centuries for a system to mature and slowly sink to the proverbial mediocre middle. Today the speed is counted in months. The internet on one hand benefits greatly from the open source collaboration on the other hand the internet is a naturally scalable machine and it sales rapidly. A groundbreaking invention saleable with the internet speed morphs quickly into a marketable mediocrity. In the past the change was long enough to wait out the early adopters. Today the system changes right in front of the early adopter’s eyes, often to their vocal dismay. This tension grows every day.

Image licensed courtesy of Picture Library of the Royal Academy of Arts